1. Set up systems

Installing operating systems Because of the limitations of my school network I did use a virtual machine. I used a iso image of Windows 7 32-bit for the operating system. The iso image ran off a memory stick, this acted as a virtual disk drive and I changed BIOS setting so that the operating system will boot up from the memory stick. 1.1 Install and set up an operating system. 1.2 Set and customize boot sequence and options.

Allocating RAM When installing Windows 32-bit edition I allocated some of the RAM, that is what my computer has, so that the software and applications can run smoothly. I have allocated 1 GB of RAM because that is the minimum requirement for windows 7 to run. Also the computer that I had the virtual window running in only had 4gb of RAM so I couldn’t put to much because the computer needed to reasonably

Changing the BIOS settings I had to change the BIOS settings of the virtual image so that it knows what file to load up on, which will be the ISO image of Windows 7.

The set up process This is the set up of Windows 7. I have set it as English United Kingdom because that is where I live and that’s the time and language I want it to be in. This will make the keyboard settings the way I like them, what I mean by this is when I type it will be in English and not in another language.

Set up of Windows 7

Setting up the hard drive Formatting NTFS file format. NTFS stands for New Technology File System, this was developed by Microsoft. This is the default file system of Windows NT family, originally the standard formatting system was FAT 32. The benefits of NTFS is advanced data structures that improves data structures to improve reliability, the disk space utilization is better than FAT 32 and the overall performance is increased.

Progress of setting up windows

The final set up step

The setting up of my desktop

1.3 customise the display to personal preference

8 bits for each primary colour, red, blue and green are used normally in modern day displays. Screens are refreshed and the rate of them being refreshed is called Hz, the minimum refresh rate for the eye not to see it being refreshed is 70Hz. The lower the refresh rate the more notable flickering can be seen on the screen. Frame rate is the number of times a display can refresh the screen within a second. The standard resolution used for monitors today is 720p, 720 is the amount of pixels vertically. p and i come after the resolution, p means that the screen is refreshed from the top down, progressive. i means that the pixels are refreshed from left to right and from top to bottom, interlaced. The more pixels the better, the lowest pixels density is 360 and it goes up by 360, which means that the next one up from 360 is 720 than 1080 than 1440 and so on. Pixels per inch is also important, the average monitor ppi is 85, for a phone it depends on the screen size. The minimum pixel density for the human eye not to see any pixels depends on the screen size. SD which stands for standard definition and it the minimal broadcasting standard. Up scaling software up scales the content you are watching to the definition of your display. It does this by doing mathematical calculations to fill the pixels with colours similar to the colours around it.

P (progressive) P tends to have smoother transitions and a sharper picture, because of this 1080p or 720p is usually used in todays tvs.

I (interlace) They interlace each other which means they swap from one to the other.

At the minute there is only the internet explorer shortcut on the taskbar. Adding shortcuts to the task bar Now there is the Windows Media centre shortcut to the task bar.

Changing the resolution The original resolution of the screen was 1024 x 768. The screen was squashed making videos and images not suitable for presentation. I have changed the resolution to the recommended resolution making everything the normal size.

1.4 set up network connections

Setting up a network allows computers within that network to communicate with each other and to connect to the internet. There are many types of network topologies: Star, Bus, Ring and peer to peer networks. The ways to connect to the internet are Wi- Fi and Ethernet cables. Wi-Fi is a wireless connection to the network and Ethernet cables connect to a physical port. The types of Ethernet cables are CAT 5 and CAT 6. CAT 5 allows 100mbs and CAT 6 allows 1gbs of data to go through it. When you connect to the internet DHCP provides you with a IP address, this is your identity on the internet after the DNS has changed it to. IP version 4 is the most commonly used but IP version 6 is the new one which has hexadecimal and this allows many combinations to make, IP version 4 doesn’t have hexadecimal so not as many combinations can be made. Many combinations are needed as there are loads of people being connected to the internet and everyone needs to have a unique IP address as it is your identification after the DNS has changed it to a name.